


Dead Man Standing

by JadedHearts



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-05
Updated: 2016-08-05
Packaged: 2018-07-29 10:40:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7681156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JadedHearts/pseuds/JadedHearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jon knows that there are things he can not take, but there is a fire inside him and a battle he can not win.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead Man Standing

When darkness falls it’s as if Jon were there again, staring into the nothing that is death. It’s a chilling notion, the nothingness, and perhaps for the first time in his tumultuous life does he understand the desperate clinging to gods and spirits. After all, if there is nothing, where is the purpose?

Standing there, bones weary and numb, he feels that darkness fall and the sun disappear as Sansa looks on at the man at his feet. Her eyes don’t frighten him, though perhaps they should.

“Jon - it’s only right,” she rasps, eyes glassy and yet wide awake, “he killed me a thousand times over.”  
And the picture of them, two Starks standing in the fresh snow as their tormentor bleeds out, is one they don’t realize will become a mark of change for them.

Ignoring the concern of his men, Jon makes his way unsteadily to his room, mind buzzing with the silent aftermath of bloodlust. Sansa is down there, looking for revenge and closure to the torture she had endured. But her dignity, he has a feeling they both know, has long died and can not be reclaimed.

“Jon,” he hears one night, outside the room his father and Lady Catelyn once slept. “Come in.”

The first he sees is her hair, out of its usual braid and cascading down the open cloak and thin nightgown she donned for the evening. The old Sansa would have been affronted at the casual and baring nature of her dress, yet the Sansa that stands just as tall as he doesn’t seem bothered by lost things anymore. He notices, for a split second, how much she undeniably has grown, now that her soft curves are not hidden away by layers of leather and fur. For a shorter instance, he wonders how much of it is scarred like his own flesh.

“What is it?” “I heard your scars have been aching more so than before,” she smiles at him coolly, eyes flitting around the room before landing on his crooked form. “The pain is not something that salve will help, Sansa,” he mumbles towards her.

“Ah, but perhaps I would like to sit with you and warm myself. The fire is always warmer with company, is it not?” her smile becomes more welcoming, but her eyes do not. Confused, he looks on at her until he remembers the semblance of manners he does still possess. “Of course,” he answers more gruffly than he’d like.

She comes slowly, a tension seeping into the room as she sways closer, and he notes things he normally wouldn’t. He’s tired to the bone yet still too awake for any sleep, and his eyes have wills of their own at this hour. Sansa stands close to him, the fire illuminating the copper strands in her hair as the smell of home permeates the air. He can feel her closeness, and it feels very right to him. He barely notices the jar she opens until the waft of medicinal herbs reach him, covering some of her scent and making him want to inch the slightest closer to her.

“I looked at him, you know,” Sansa states calmly while reaching for his tunic, smoothly ridding him of it, “When he was so torn I could hardly see his face for all the blood, I looked harder to try to find the part of me he kept to himself.” Her eyes trace his scars before her pale fingers do.

Watching her from the corner from his eye, he asks, “And did you find what you were looking for?” She pauses, looking at his temple, not quite his eye, “No.”

Her fingers are gentle, and the picture of her elegant hands gliding across the ugly and red gashes on his chest that continue to bleed and puff hits him like a jab in his chest. A pull, of sorts. One he has a distant memory of, but can’t quite place.

“You know, when I was in King’s Landing, I rarely thought of you,” her tone becomes lighter, almost whimsical, “You were so far away, fighting a man’s war and I was there, living the life of the woman I was perhaps just meant to be. How naive I must have been, how stupid. To be so highly strung yet all I would become would be a wife, a body-”

He takes her hand as her nails turn suddenly, as though on accident, and rake over his nipple. “You know what I told you, Sansa. I will protect you, I will.” She looks into his eyes, finally, and her eyes gleam almost grey in the light. “You know you can’t save someone like me anymore. Nobody can.”

And for the first time in all the time he has known her, even before she was sent away, he sees a glimmer of vulnerability. But it is soon lost as she turns sharply, rummaging around in the cloak she had left aside. Her movements are jagged and unsure, and Jon is far too tired, yet simmering at the same time. He is tired of her evasiveness.

“ _Sansa_.” She halts, still as a statue. He looks at her hunched back, so very much like his own crookedness, and the jolt returns with more force. His arm shoots out out before he can stop it, grasping her shoulder and yanking her his way.

“You are here now, with me. I _need_ you to be well, do you understand?! What else do I have left but you, and what else do you have left but me?”

The words barely leave his mouth for his teeth are so tightly clenched, but Sansa’s eyes are pinned on his, searching for truth in his words as he holds her face close to his own. The tension is coiled between his very veins as the tiredness lets his patience slip away, and he has the urge to show her exactly what they still have left. The hands that softly danced across his chest are grasped so tightly in his own that he can feel them throb with defiance and life, and he is hungry for that.

He feels he could crush her delicate skull right there with the storm raging in him, but the madness flickers in her eyes just the same and he knows she understands. Cheeks flushed, lips cracked, her body feels like something he wants to have, to hold. If he doesn’t, he is certain he will die again. The blood that rushes through her battered body, the steeliness in her eyes that holds everything together - it sends a shock of need through him. Jon can feel Sansa's breath on his face, her body thrumming underneath his and her pulse quickening. He doesn’t know if it is fear, anger, or something else all together, but when the salve jar slips out of her hands and crashes to the floor, he wakes as if from a trance.

'I nearly kissed her', he suddenly realizes, and a cold shiver travels down his spine. 'My half-sister. I nearly took her in my hands and brutalized her.'

Stunned at himself, his grip slackens and he lets go, her fiery strands running through his fingers like blood. 'What only would father say then.'

Blankly, he looks off to the side. Sansa is urgently whispering something to him, but if he stays one more second she will have more bruises to bare, and how are his any different from those the other men left?

“Sansa, please leave.” “Jon-” “Leave!”

He can’t look at her, staring into the flames and hoping that their blindness would blind him, wash away the sins and the need. He can still feel the warmth of her body, the slope of her curves under that whisper of a nightgown, and growls as she stands there, defiant and rigid. The monster inside him struggles to rear its ugly head again as he watches the flames dance in the hearth, and yet she won’t leave and he is losing yet another battle.

“ _Leave_.”

A tone so broken escapes his lips and the air stands still as Sansa gasps quietly. Of course she knows what happened. But there are things Jon can’t succumb to lest he lose the very last pieces of his humanity, and he knows that after life there is only darkness.

As she leaves, the door closes with the smallest sound. His eyes drill holes into the bright fire as it dances, and the soft cries of his sister ghost through the walls of their childhood home.


End file.
